


The White Hours of Continuation

by tmelange



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Angst, Jealousy, M/M, Original Character(s), Plotty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2002-08-30
Updated: 2011-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:31:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tmelange/pseuds/tmelange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lies, weakness, the deception of self, love, jealousy, betrayal—with Schwarz on the loose, Yohji in love with the newest Weiss member and Kritiker playing a covert game of poker with Weiss as the chips, Aya must find a path to the heart of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Episode One: White as Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in August 2002, updated November 2005.

With wings that will not ever  
be folded a butterfly  
will be made to soar  
indefinitely in the white  
hours of continuation.

Saito Fumi, from _Three Tanka_

~~~

Episode One: _White As Rain_

Standing off to the side by a pile of cardboard boxes, Aya watched, listened. The team had just gotten out of their black van in a narrow, trash-littered alley within sight of the Customs warehouses at Tokyo Docks and Jack was already _touching_ Yohji. Impassively, Aya took note of the way Jack grabbed Yohji around the waist and pulled the taller man to his side.

"Try being careful this time, butthead," Jack said softly. "No heroics. I don't care what happens. I'm too young to have all my hair turn gray."

Yohji raised a gloved hand and tucked a stray ebony lock behind Jack's left ear. "I'm always careful, Beavis," he stated confidently, with a smirk.

Perhaps it was the concealing darkness of so many shadows that made Jack think his behavior was appropriate in the middle of a mission, or maybe his actions merely reflected the fact that . . . _he has the right._ To touch Yohji. Aya's mouth twisted into a full-fledged scowl before he remembered that he didn't care at all about Jack and Yohji; he was as impervious to the two of them as stone.

Biting his lip, Aya forced his eyes away and tried to focus his attention on Ken as his younger teammate unloaded two large black cases from the back of the van. He considered helping, but only briefly. Despite his best intentions, he just couldn't stop his eyes from flittering over to where Yohji and Jack continued their whispered conversation. Though the two of them took pains to keep their voices low, their words echoed in the narrow alley, bouncing off the surrounding walls, multiplying against the metal trashcans as if the square confine was a giant pinball machine. Without even trying very hard, Aya could hear every sugarcoated syllable. Disgusted with them, with himself, he turned away.

It wasn't that he cared. _I don't care._ It was just Yohji's voice that bothered him—always bothered him—the most. Every teasing inflection was so intimately familiar, so intrinsically _Yohji._ Despite the fact that he was talking to someone . . . _else,_ Aya couldn't help but be reminded of their own late night exchanges on Yohji's many excesses during those days when _he_ was the one who had the right to chide Yohji on his lack of caution, his constant womanizing, his binge drinking. The voice was the voice of bittersweet memory; the tone was exactly the same.

 _Everything that had been between us, everything that had gone before—so unforgettable, so easily forgotten...._

Aya picked up the thread of the conversation even though his back was turned.

"Besides, that's all you had to say," Yohji drawled. "I'd never do _anything_ to harm that pretty head of yours. I love all this...."

But not being able to witness what was going on behind him with his own eyes was more than Aya could bear. He spun around, just in time to see Yohji reach out and tangle his fingers in Jack's long hair and use the other to tilt his chin up. Yohji brushed his lips lazily and so lightly against Jack's that the effort would not exactly qualify as a kiss if Yohji was ever called on it. Even so, Aya's gloved hand clenched involuntarily around the hilt of his katana.

"Just watch your own ass," Yohji added as he swatted Jack's posterior. "Don't give me a reason to play the superhero." Unwrapping himself from the arm around his waist, Yohji stepped away.

Aya blinked. The space now separating his two teammates was deceptive, obviously designed to morph their recent interaction into a harmless exchange. They were no longer touching but it was plainly, sickeningly obvious to anyone who wasn't completely blind that they were together. A pair. A matched set.

Something like hate pooled in the pit of Aya's stomach as he digested everything—the entire display.

"But it's much more fun watching yours," Jack said, smiling with those perfectly straight white teeth in a face that was almost too handsome in its symmetry. Jack reached out, attempting to touch Yohji again. "It's so . . . pert."

Yohji raised an eyebrow. "You just keep your eyes in your head and your hands to yourself." Dancing away from Jack, Yohji adjusted his gloves, patted his pockets, fiddled with the fit of his long black coat, checked his equipment for the mission—staying just out of Jack's reach but close enough to be tantalizing. "Look at you." Yohji shook a finger and sighed dramatically. "Always trying to corrupt the innocent...."

"Innocent?" Jack scoffed. "Who? You?" He advanced on Yohji menacingly.

Flashing his familiar, lopsided grin, Yohji took a step backwards and opened his mouth to respond. "I—"

"You two," Aya snapped, cutting him off. "Stop it or go home." He had had enough of the two of them and their _flirting._

Yohji closed his mouth with an audible click. He turned toward Aya with surprise and indignation written all over his long, sun-kissed features. "What the—?"

"Come on, guys." Ken stepped into view from the back of the van, cutting into the exchange before a full-blown argument could erupt. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it was loud enough to convey his exasperation. Ken placed a set of grappling hooks next to one of the large black suitcases filled with smoke bomb explosives and headed back to the vehicle to retrieve the rest of the gear designed to get the team up and down the side of the building. "Check in with Bombay and let's go," he said over a shoulder. "The targets won't be here all night."

Aya spared his younger teammate a cold, implacable glare then ignored him completely. Ken Hidaka was not important _at all._ Aya's granite stare and all of his attention were reserved for Yohji, daring him to make an issue of his last command. Stop it. Stop it.

But Yohji just shrugged him off and turned away, back towards Jack . . . _as if nothing I say matters, as if I don't even exist._ Aya stood as still as a statue for a moment with his heart skipping in his chest, his hand tightening on the hilt of the sword at his waist. Not wanting to betray himself with a random act of violence—though the violence welled up in his throat, choking him—he spun on his heel and stalked to the mouth of the alley. Carefully, he peered around the corner, trying to get a good look at the front of the large warehouse that was their destination. The night sky was cloud-obscured; it was almost too dark out to see anything useful. From this distance and without the moon or the stars or at least a few streetlights to illuminate the area, the building looked completely deserted, but Aya knew that perception to be erroneous.

He took a deep breath; the air stank of seawater and raw fish. Ignoring the assault on his nose, he tried to slow his racing heart and school his expression to indifference, knowing he would have to turn around and face his teammates as soon as he finished his observations. Part of his mind automatically carried out the tasks of a trained assassin—studying the area around the warehouse through his infrared binoculars, looking for guards, making sure the most obvious means of entering and exiting the building matched the blueprints included in the mission report—but the other, more aggressive part of his attention latched on to the whispered conversation in the alley behind him. He could hear Ken scolding Yohji for not helping with the equipment.

"Why are you just standing around? Why do I always get stuck unloading the van?"

"Simple," Yohji answered, sounding completely unconcerned. "Some of us were meant to be movers, and the others, shakers. You wouldn't ask a Thoroughbred to pull a plow."

A long silence ensued. Aya could almost hear the little wheels in Ken's head turning. "Are you calling me a mule?" he finally asked. Ken raised his voice an indignant notch. "Listen, Balinese, I am _not_ your slave. I'm a member of the team, same as you, and everyone—even a conceited, overbearing asshole, like yourself—has to do their share—"

Yohji interrupted, displaying his most insufferable, condescending manner for everyone to appreciate. "Oh, I don't object to doing my share, Siberian. You're just so good at the little stuff, while my talents are clearly better suited to more . . . important . . . activities."

"You might want to stick a pin in that head of yours, Bali, before you float away—"

 _Jack. Always exerting his influence, interfering where he had no right, acting like Yohji's keeper...._

The exchange went on and on, and Aya continued to listen with an odd, detached fascination. He felt like a voyeur—standing on the fringes of it all, ghost-like, insubstantial, irrelevant. Nothing he could do or say affected anything at all. It was just another step in his slow sink into invisibility. Look, my arms, my legs are disappearing. Soon, very soon, he would cease to exist; any moment now Aya, the teammate, the Weiss assassin, the . . . _friend_. . . would be nothing more than a faded memory. Gone. _Just like Ran Fujimiya._

He took another deep breath, trying to settle a stomach that lurched and felt as if it wanted to empty itself on the ground in front of him. He looked up, studied the dark storm clouds swirling angrily overhead. The heavy clouds looked about ready to fall down the night sky. Surely, rain was imminent. Aya hoped they could get in and out of the warehouse, finish the mission, before the storm broke. There was nothing worse than trying to retreat in the pouring rain, nothing worse than being soaking wet and miserable, trying to ditch the van and complete evasive maneuvers. There was nothing worse than being completely and utterly miserable....

Viciously, he smothered that line of thought, turned and stalked over to the three young men still arguing quietly by the van. Aya glared at each of his teammates. "If you three can't shut up and concentrate on the mission, we might as well abort right now," he stated without preamble.

"Whoa. Take it easy, Abyssinian." Yohji—of course—mocking him from behind his ridiculous sunglasses. "We were just waiting for you to finish. How does it look?"

Aya kept his response as short as possible and his gaze fixed on the brick wall to the right of Yohji's head. "Quiet. Exactly as expected."

Yohji nodded. "Good. Bombay's in position. We're ready whenever you are, oh fearless leader."

Aya felt his hands clench inside the pockets of his trench coat. How he hated Yohji's irreverence, his lackadaisical attitude, his . . . fickleness! He hated everything about the man, hated everything he stood for on every level. What he wouldn't give to knock that derisive half-smile off the man's face—along with those stupid glasses.

Aya focused on Yohji's face momentarily—he couldn't help it—before he turned his back on the man. As much as he wanted to follow through and knock Yohji's lights out, he realized it would have to be later. He and Yohji had come to blows often enough in the past. If nothing else was left of their— _friendship?_ —Aya was sure he could still push the right buttons to get Yohji to throw the first punch. Then he would beat his face in. Right now, though, they had a mission to complete, and he needed to keep his mind on the business at hand.

"Siberian," he snapped, making Ken jump, "go with Javanese. Make sure you stick to the plan. Wait for Bombay's signal before you enter the building." He focused on Yohji next. "Balinese, you're with me."

"Wait," Jack interrupted quickly. "I've got Balinese."

Aya speared him with an impatient glare. "Not this time."

"I didn't prepare for this," Jack objected, his confusion evident. He turned towards Ken. "No offense, but I've never worked with Siberian. I—"

"You should be able to work with any member of the team," Aya said, cutting him off.

"I can. It's just—"

 _"What IS the problem then?"_ Aya said, his voice low, barbed, the question inviting no real answer other than compliance.

Jack ran a pale hand through his hair and sighed as if he needed to dip into some inner well of patience. He tilted his head in Yohji's direction and adopted a placating tone that Aya resented almost as much as the original objection. "Look, we always work together. It takes a lot of concentration to set the charges. I'd just feel more comfortable with Balinese at my back because, up until now, I've worked with him exclusively."

Aya scoffed. That _reason_ wasn't even worth a serious response. "Too bad," he said coldly. "Let's go."

"Wait a minute!” Jack stepped toward Aya belligerently. _"Too bad?_ Who the hell do you think you're talking to?" He raised his voice a notch. "I'm really getting sick of the way you boss everyone around, the way you expect everyone to jump on your say-so. Who the hell died and made you king of the world? Kritiker assigned me to this team to work with Balinese; I've been working with him for months. If you wanted to change the SOP, you should have said something back at the house. You don't just order me at the last minute—"

"Javanese, come _on."_ Ken placed a hand on Jack's shoulder, trying to pull him away.

Aya hadn't moved during the whole of Jack's tirade. His attention was locked on Yohji, waiting for the reaction that was the most important part of this whole exchange. _Pick a side!_ he wanted to scream as Yohji simply gazed in his direction, his face on the verge of an expression Aya couldn't precisely identify through the mask of his sunglasses. But when Yohji failed to make his opinion known, Aya expelled the breath he hadn't realized he was holding in disgust and turned the dagger of his attention on Jack.

"If you don't like the way I've set up this mission, you can leave," he announced bluntly.

Gesturing, Jack exploded in frustration. "You're such an asshole, Abyssinian! I'm sure that's exactly what you want, for me to leave—"

Aya interrupted, taking some satisfaction in the fact that he was able to maintain his composure in the face of Jack's heated pitch. "If you want to participate in this mission, you'll go with Siberian. If not, go home."

Jack shook his head. "No. _YOU_ are a lunatic. You're fucking crazy."

Finally, just as Aya had come to expect, Yohji spoke up in Jack's defense. "Come on, Abyssinian,” Yohji said slowly. “Is this really the time to try something new? What difference would it make?"

Aya turned on him. He had been waiting so breathlessly for Yohji to say something, to pick a side. Now that Yohji had demonstrated once again that Jack was all that mattered, that Jack would always be considered first, it was as if a stone had been thrown at the fault point in the facade of his indifference. The wall crumbled, broke.

It makes all the difference, _Balinese,"_ Aya snarled. "You're the only one with specific experience climbing buildings. Javanese is the only one experienced in setting the smoke bomb charges. It's completely impractical during _this_ mission for the two of you to be working together. _You_ need to be on the roof, and you," Aya stabbed his finger in Jack's direction, "need to enter on the ground level."

Jack rolled his eyes and turned away in disgust. "You have it all figured out, don't you? You're so full of shit—"

"Wait a minute." Yohji interrupted Jack, and it was a good thing that he did because Aya was about to shut his mouth with a fist. Jack was right about one thing: he had thought everything out in advance. There was absolutely no gap in his logic. For this mission, it made the most sense for them to return to their original partner pairings—the pairings that had been in place _before_ Jack had joined the team. That meant he would team with Yohji, Ken with Jack. Jack would take the place of Omi, who was parked on the other side of the building, serving as tactical for this mission. Aya went over his reasoning again, and it was only Yohji's voice that jerked him out of his reverie. He realized that Yohji had stepped closer and put a hand on his arm in a placating gesture. Aya jerked his arm away. Immediately, he realized that shying away from Yohji's touch so violently had been a mistake. Whereas Yohji might have agreed with his reasoning and backed him just because what he wanted to do made the most _sense,_ his thoughtless rejection caused Yohji to stiffen and to take a step backwards. Aya knew if he could see behind those glasses, he would find that Yohji's green eyes were as hard and as cold as emerald shards.

So instead of support, he was handed scorn on a platter.

"Abyssinian, stop being such a control freak. People are going to think you really are crazy." Yohji's tone was cold, biting, causing Aya to flinch before he was able to readjust his mask of stone. Yohji threw an arm around Ken's shoulders. "Do you think you can get yourself up the side of that warehouse?" he asked. "It's only the height of a ten-story building." Yohji grinned challengingly. "A child could do it."

"Sure." Ken shrugged. "I never tried it before, but how difficult can it be?"

"Good. Problem solved." Yohji smirked. "You really need to work on your people skills, _Abyssinian,"_ he added snidely. He waved a gloved hand at Aya and turned away, dismissing him . . . again. "Let's go." Briskly, Yohji nodded his head in Jack's direction.

"That's just like you," Aya spat at his retreating back. "Leave it to you to put your relationship with your _boyfriend_ before the success of a mission just so you can keep getting _fucked_ on a regular basis."

Jack spun around, rushed over to him in a whirlwind of affront and pointed a finger in his face. "I know what this is about. You're just fucking jealous—"

Anger blazed up in Aya's gut like a fire rising from his groin into his chest; it was an actual heat, a blistering flame at the back of his throat. His sword was halfway out of its sheath before he realized it.

"What the _hell_ are you doing?" Yohji's voice was incredulous. Iron fingers gripped his wrist, preventing him from drawing the weapon. Using his height advantage, Yohji crowded him and pushed him back until he bumped into a wall. Green eyes glared over the top edge of those black sunglasses. _Leave it to Yohji to use the press of his body to control a situation,_ Aya thought bitterly. He wanted to scream at the man to back away from him, force him to do so if necessary, but all he did was stare at Yohji stupidly, struck speechless by the intensity and anger in his teammate's eyes. And all his brain could think was that, for the first time in a long time, he had actually managed to capture every single bit of Yohji's attention.

"Dammit, Aya!" Yohji whispered fiercely, leaning in with lips so close to the side of his head, Aya could feel the hot exhalation of breath tickle his ear. "What's the matter with you tonight? Give us a break. We all know what we're doing."

Yohji pulled back, but only slightly. Their eyes met and locked to an inaudible sound that was like a crash of cymbals in the cavern of Aya's head . . . and that's when it happened. Just like all the other times—the intangible feeling expanding inside his chest, the red heat flaring up within him just like it always did whenever his body was in close proximity to Yohji's. Aya couldn't help but respond, couldn't stop the breath that hitched in his throat, the tightening in his groin. Worse, he could tell Yohji felt the exact same thing too but dismissed the reaction as irrelevant. Aya could pinpoint the precise moment Yohji remembered that Jack was standing only a few feet away. He could tell the second Yohji dismissed even the _possibility_ of anything more between them. All Aya could do was hold his breath, wanting nothing other than to reach out and grab Yohji, pull him into the chasm of feeling and fear and desire separating them in a blazing downward spiral. But before he could move, Yohji let him go and took a step backwards . . . and everything changed again, like a white moment of ending.

"This is ridiculous." Yohji smirked and used a long finger to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, hiding his eyes. "Why is everyone fighting over me? I know I'm beautiful but—"

"Jeez. Fuck. Now look what you did." Ken. Exasperated. Aya barely heard him. "Can we go now? Before Yohji's head gets so big, he can't get out of the alley?"

Aya looked away. He refused to show his weakness, to do anything else to embarrass himself.

"You're just jealous, kid," Yohji joked. "Catch you two on the far side." He retrieved one of the suitcases sitting by the side of the van then nodded at Jack, indicating he was ready to go. Yohji glanced in Aya's direction but only negligibly. "Watch your ass," he added over his shoulder as he and Jack walked side-by-side down the alley.

Aya stood, still as death, like a mummy with the cloth wrappings of a past life leeching all of the essential fluids out of his body. Aya hated him, hated them both with an apocalyptic passion that went way beyond rational thought. If they both dropped dead, if he never had to see Jack or Yohji ever again, it would be too soon. Of course, Jack glanced back at him over a shoulder. The expression on his face wasn't exactly mocking but it certainly wasn't innocuous. Perhaps it was the quirk at the corner of his mouth that challenged, the lifted eyebrow that gloated, or the small expression that said: _I have everything you want and shall never have._ The inside of Aya's stomach clenched as he watched the two assassins fade into a night of heavy black ink—a night without the whiteness of the moon, the light of the stars to chase away the darkness.

The next time Aya saw the two of them, they were all on the roof of the warehouse, fighting desperately for their lives in the pouring rain.

Everything had gone wrong— _everything_ —and it was . . . All. Yohji's. Fault. Aya dodged to avoid the fist aimed at his face and almost lost his footing on the wet, slick tar of the roof floor. Snarling, he recovered himself just in time to prevent a disaster that could have meant his life, and brought his sword around and down, effectively splitting his assailant in two.

 _Damn Yohji!_

Predictably, Ken hadn't been able to make it up the building, especially not in the wind and the driving rain. Aya had to practically put the boy on his back so they could both reach the rooftop. After all, climbing up the side of a building is an art. It requires a certain amount of expertise; it is not something easily learned on the fly, working under a deadline. Aya growled as he hamstrung a man trying to knock him to the floor. Why had he given in to Yohji in the first place? He should have stood his ground, insisted that Ken go with Jack. Certainly, it had all been a downhill slide from that pathetic point of capitulation.

Aya marked the number of opponents still standing and tried to estimate the likelihood they would be able to do what they had to do and make it out alive. Barring anything else going wrong, their chances were excellent. After all, they were _Weiss._ But it was going to be very messy.

 _Damn Yohji and Jack and their stupid fucking relationship!_

Aya tried to brush sopping wet hair out of his eyes before bringing his sword up to block an advance by another burly bodyguard. _Damn._ It was clear that the guards were not ordinary guards, and there were many more of them than expected; but none of that would have mattered if they had been able to execute the plan, if he and Ken had been in position as the targets had attempted to come up the stairwell and out onto the roof to escape the smoke.

The failure of their comm system Aya was willing to blame on the storm.

Everything else, though, was entirely Yohji's fault.

The wind was picking up; rain lashed across his face; thunder rumbled loudly, punctuating the fight. The moon, big and bright, had finally broken through the clouds, providing much needed light by which to fight. Aya stuck his sword through the stomach of another man. As he turned to meet his next challenge, he was presented with a moment of pure respite: no opponents were in his immediate vicinity. With a quick glance around, he located Ken. He was gratified to see that his younger teammate was positioned to protect the man with the black hood over his head. Aya almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of the situation. Yes, to top the whole night off, there was a man with a black cloth bag over his head. The captive was shackled and handcuffed and being dragged around by the targets. Aya had no way of knowing whether Weiss should kill the man in the hood along with the targets or rescue him.

Then the night went from bad to worse with the ridiculous quickness of a cheap novel. A military helicopter appeared, out of _nowhere,_ adding wind and noise and general confusion to the heart of the storm. Two men jumped off the runner, and it was immediately clear that _their_ target was the man in the hood—but to kill him or rescue him?

Aya wasn't sure what was going on, but he did know one thing: if some other group wanted the man in the hood so badly, Weiss wanted to stop them, at least until the team could determine the man's identity. Aya assessed his options as he started towards the hovering vehicle. Ken had moved out of range. Yohji and Jack were still fighting the last of the guards by the door to the stairwell. Looking at Jack and Yohji made Aya want to spit even with everything else that was going on. It was bitter, to see them fighting in perfect tandem, anticipating each other's moves, existing in perfect sync. In fact, the sight of the two of them together actually made his head hurt. Yohji and Jack and their stupid _relationship_ were going to get them all killed.

But Aya noticed something else too. It almost looked as if Yohji was having some trouble with the two guards he still had to put down. Aya paused for a moment, managing across the veil of rain to make eye contact with him. He was loath to let the helicopter escape with his quarry . . . but maybe Yohji needed his help?

"Yohji!"

 _Jack._

Of course, Yohji didn't need his help. He had Jack.

Aya turned his back on the two of them, running toward the helicopter and the interlopers attempting to maneuver the hooded man up and into it.

 _Dammit!_ He didn't want that helicopter to get away.

It was only at the moment when he reached the two men struggling to lift the hooded man into the chopper and was able to see in through the cargo door that Aya began to suspect the mission suffered from a severe lack of intelligence. Crawford and the gun, and the bullet speeding towards his head brought the point into sharp relief. _Yes, a definite glitch in the Kritiker intelligence-gathering mechanism,_ he mused dryly.

Aya dived. It felt exactly like a dive into a pool to him because the water from a ten square foot area rose up and covered him as the helicopter pulled away from the roof.

 _Well, I may be soaking wet, but at least I'm not dead._

Aya got to his feet smoothly, and immediately, sought out Yohji.

The rest happened so fast Aya couldn't tell whether he actually saw it happen or whether the events were just hanging in the air—the way the reverberations of terrible events sometimes do—and he simply deduced the sequence in a horrible leap of intuition.

There was Yohji, exactly where he had left him, on the other side of a veil of rain. _Where is Jack?_ Yohji had his wire around the neck of the last guard, but something was clearly wrong. Yohji looked like he was hurting, like it was an effort to finish the man off.

Between one breath and the next, another man appeared in the doorway to the stairs. Before Aya could move or yell a word of warning, the man stepped behind Yohji, stabbed him in the back—once, twice—grabbed his hair, pulled his head back and slit his throat.

Time fractured; the whole world froze in silence and whiteness at such a pitch of twined intensity . . . it was blinding, deafening.

Aya's knees buckled out from under him. Like a carefully choreographed scene in a horror movie, he and Yohji hit the wet tar at the same time—Aya was sure of it. His sword fell from nerveless fingers. There wasn't enough air to pull into heaving lungs. He was drowning in his own blood.

 _Yohji._

He stumbled to his feet just long enough to move across the separating distance and to fall down at Yohji's side. He placed a gloved hand to Yohji's throat, trying to stop the bleeding.

 _No._

There was a lot of blood. Yohji was lying in a pool of it. The blood and the rainwater had combined to turn the rooftop into a soppy red soup. Aya noticed these details but only tangentially, subconsciously. The crux of his attention was narrowed down to the head of a pin, focused on Yohji's face and the act of pressing hand to wound to staunch the crimson flow, at least until he noticed the most _singular_ thing. A thing so captivating, it consumed all of his attention like a raging inferno does oxygen.

 _His eyes—they're beautiful._

 _So beautiful._

Yohji had lost his sunglasses at some point. His eyes were opened wide, unfocused and bright with pain. Eyes like emeralds locked on Aya's in hurt and confusion.

"Aya?" It was nothing more than a whispering gurgle. To Aya, it sounded like a shout echoing inside his own chest. "Why...?"

Those eyes—they accused him.

 _Betrayer! False friend!_

Then the awful gurgling stopped. Eyelids quivered and . . . closed.

Aya held his breath—would hold it forever, if necessary—and waited for them to open again, to once more be caught, speechless, by the riddle in those green eyes.

Distantly, he could hear Ken in the background, yelling frantically over the storm, "Bombay! _Balinese is down!_ We need help up here!" but everything seemed so removed, as if it was happening far away, at the other end of a very long tunnel.

 _Yohji._ Aya leaned in, touched his lips to Yohji's cold, wet lips. "Heart of my heart," he whispered, choking on the words—four words that were everything he had always wanted to say and never had, the remnants of a past time, the words his father used to say to his mother when they were alive. They loved each other very much.

Aya stayed like that, hand to throat, lips pressed to lips, until Jack rammed into him like an eighteen-wheel truck, knocking him over and away from Yohji's prostrate form. And everything changed again.

"Get away from him, you son-of-a-bitch! WHY? You could have— You fucking bastard! Are you happy now? ARE YOU HAPPY?"

Aya ignored him. Jack mattered least of all. All that mattered was that Yohji was dying— _dead?_ —and that it was his fault. All his fault!

Aya pushed himself to his hands and knees, turned and allowed himself one last, lingering look. Lying there, Yohji looked like a painting, a masterpiece desecrated with splashes of wet red paint. After all that they had been through, it was almost funny that he would be the one to cause _his best friend's_ death, that in the end, he would be the one responsible. _Almost funny_ . . . He laughed. He couldn't stop laughing.

"Abyssinian . . . are you okay?" Ken. Grabbing him, shaking him. "Aya. Stop it." Shaking him harder. "Aya!"

How hysterical, to have lost everything— _the sun, the moon, the stars, the day, the night, the sunrise, the sunset_ —even the last little bit of twilight he had found since joining Weiss. All that was left to him was the rain.

"I can't . . . I can't deal with this now. I have to . . . Yohji . . ." Ken shook him again. "Stay here," he ordered then moved away.

Aya couldn't—he couldn't raise his head. Tears filled his eyes. A sob swelled in his throat. Wrong. _It was all so wrong._ He couldn't live like this. He couldn't live deprived of _everything._

And that was when it came to him—the answer—like a flash of lightning marvelous in its simplicity. Carefully, he crawled on his hands and knees through the water and across the roof to retrieve his sword.

His hand gripped the hilt with relief. Sitting back on his heels, ignoring the wet tar and the puddles, he settled his mind into that familiar meditative state he always used to practice his sword work. He sank into that distant feeling of uncommon sensitivity, intense focus. It was startling how sharp things seemed at the edges of his perception, how profound. Everything was so much more real—the thunder, the lightning, especially the rain that fell in white sheets, washing even the dirtiest things clean.

Slowly, so slowly, he got to his knees.

"Aya...?" Ken, from across the way, but not close enough to matter. "What are you doing?"

Aya ignored him. He fingered the wet handle of his katana, positioned the hilt properly against a leg and let himself fall . . . forward.

"No! _AYA!"_

As the edges settled, folded, sank in and the warm blood flowed, Aya wondered at the kaleidoscope of feelings that assaulted his senses. He wanted desperately to put a name to the one that was sweeping him up, that was easing him into the vortex of darkness expanding all around him. _What is this feeling?_ He wanted to know. _What do I feel...?_ Then it came to him like the rush of the sea, with the intense acuity of a revelation. Behind the shock, the panic, the terrible fear, what he really felt was incredible _relief._ Relief that he would be spared—that dead, he would not have to witness what he had wrought.


	2. Interlude: The White House of Death

Interlude: _The White House of Death_

The words kept repeating in his head, over and over, like a mantra, soft, reverent.

 _Tonight, it rains like never before; and I  
don’t feel like staying alive, heart._

Aya opened his eyes . . .

. . . and was hit by a wall of unrelenting whiteness. Flinching, he shut his eyes again and opened them more carefully, allowing them to adjust to the brightness.

"What the—?" His voice sounded ridiculously small and so unlike himself that he stopped speaking abruptly and bit his lip.

Where was he? He held a hand to his face, trying to shade his eyes. He couldn't see anything at all; he had only the vaguest feeling of being surrounded. There was too much bright light shinning right in his face, preventing him from determining whether he was in a house or a hospital, inside a building or outside in the street. He thought he was lying down and tried to sit up but was struck by an undulating wave of vertigo.

 _What is this place? What is happening to me?_

Then he thought, _Maybe, I am standing up,_ but that notion felt wrong too. Ridiculous as it seemed, he really couldn't tell up from down. The whole situation was very disconcerting, and Aya was getting annoyed.

Unable to get a proper bearing, he tried to reason out his odd state of being. It was possible he was having an out-of-body experience. Perhaps he was unconscious, in an operating room, and the bright light was a surgical lamp shinning on his face; perhaps he was actually lying on a table in some hospital with a bevy of doctors trying to save his pathetic life.

 _Or maybe,_ he thought bitterly, _I'm still lying on the rooftop in the rain. The moon is shining on my face and this is simply what it feels like to be dying._

It could be that dying was a slow process—as slow as living a lifetime—and this moment was just the beginning of it. In that case, maybe he could simply shut his eyes until it was all over.

 _Tonight, it rains like never before; and I  
don’t feel like staying alive, heart._

 _Stop it!_ Aya shook his head, trying to rid himself of the incessant repetition of words. His senses rebelled at the sudden movement. He stilled, trying to figure out what to do next, until the impression of a shadowy presence somewhere off to his left side caught his attention. He was being observed.

It was something, _someone,_ but Aya couldn't see well enough in the light to distinguish features. Instead, he called out, "Hello?"

 _"Aya."_

The voice was completely asexual. Aya was taken aback by how neutral the sound of a voice could be when his senses were restricted to the impression of a lurking shadow that stayed just at the edge of his very limited visual perception.

His confusion intensified momentarily, but then clarity hit him like a hammer. _Maybe . . ._

"Am I dead?" he called out stiltedly. He didn't care; he just wanted to know. "Is this Hell?"

 _"Hell?_ No, silly! This is the Tokyo Dome." And suddenly . . . _it was._

They were sitting in the stands at . . . a baseball game inside the bubble dome, surrounded by thousands of people, some wearing t-shirts, some in suits. He couldn't see anybody's face; they all had their backs turned, even the people sitting on the other side of the stadium, strangely enough. But the complete silence, the absolute absence of sound was the most shocking thing of all.

"The Giants are winning. Want some popcorn?"

"Who are you?" Aya looked around, amazed, taking in the stadium, the white dome ceiling, the people. "What am I doing here?"

"A-ya! You don't recognize me? It's me—Sakura." And suddenly . . . _she was._

He turned towards the girl and studied her intently. She had the same brown hair, the same face, the same eyes that reminded him so much of his little sister. "Sakura?" he asked finally. Maybe he really had gone crazy this time. "What are you doing in Hell with me?"

Sakura sighed dramatically. "Aya, we are _not_ in Hell. Sometimes, you are just so . . ." She shook her head. "Forget it. Aren't you happy to see me?"

 _Happy?_ "No. Yes. I guess." Aya stopped himself. "Listen, just tell me what's going on. Where are we? What am I—what are _we_ —doing here?"

"Aya! We're on a date, of course. You promised to take me to a baseball game for my birthday, and here we are. Stop acting so silly."

"But . . . Yohji . . ."

Sakura's face darkened. "I won't have you talking about _him_ when you're out with _me_ on my birthday, Aya. It's not fair."

 _She's right._ He bit his lip, reflexive guilt tying his tongue. Whatever mad reality he had fallen into, clearly the situation with Sakura was substantially the same.

 _But Yohji . . ._

"Oh alright!" Sakura huffed, causing him to jump. "We'll talk about your precious _Yohji._ Since it's all you can think about anyway. It's not like anything has _changed."_

"Sakura—" Aya stopped abruptly. He felt ashamed. Whether he was dead and in Hell or alive and locked in some sort of self-induced hysteria, it didn't excuse the fact that he always seemed to be hurting her. She was just another innocent, another person in his life who was paying for his mistakes. He had used her, integrated her into his living facade, knowing that her love for him would excuse just about anything.

So he said the words he had never managed to say to her before. "Sakura, I'm sorry...."

Sakura laughed . . .

. . . as the scene faded to white around them.

"Funny how the specter of death makes a penitent of even the most arrogant."

They were back in the white room. This time, he could tell that he was standing up, and the light shining in his face wasn't nearly as bright. The room was very large, impossibly large. Although the impression that he was in an enclosed space persisted, he couldn't see the ceiling, and the walls seemed to meander beyond his line of sight.

Aya had stopped trying to figure out where he was or what type of strange thing would happen next. He studied Sakura sourly while she batted her long lashes and smiled at him playfully. After a moment, she waved him over to a white couch that appeared out of nowhere at the motion of her hand.

Resignedly, he followed her. He noticed she was wearing her school uniform and looked exactly the same as on the first day he had met her—that day when Kritiker assigned Weiss to work on the case of her missing kidney. Of course, he realized she looked wrong. In fact, she was actually two years older on the last day he had seen her in life. She should be taller and her brown hair should be much longer since she had let it grow. It was just a confirmation that he was probably dead and about to be judged for all his sins by some entity that merely adopted the shape of someone familiar to him. Still . . .

"Why you?" he asked as he sat down next to her. Why was she the one to meet him here in this place? What gave her the right to judge his sins?

"Because life is circular in that way, Aya, and everything, especially love, comes back around."

"Love?"

Sakura tittered. "Oh, that's right. I almost forgot. You don't love me. You always made it a point to keep any talk of love out of the equation, completely off limits." Her gaze hardened. The mature expression would have seemed ridiculous on her innocent face but for her eyes that were deep like pools of violet liquid. "But now that we're here, in this place of souls, just tell me: when you were as cold as a fish, using my body for your pleasure, who were you thinking about?"

Aya flushed scarlet. He eyes shifted away from her face.

"Tell me."

The command was akin to a compulsion. Aya had no choice but to answer.

"Yohji."

"He doesn't love you, you know," she said waspishly. "He loves Jack."

Aya refused to rise to the bait. _What did she know?_ He shifted on the couch, turned his face and studied the wall.

"You think you can change his mind," she scoffed. "You think he doesn't know what he wants. Isn't that right, Aya?" He turned, glared at her. "And yet, weren't _you_ the one telling _me_ that I didn't love you. That I was just a lonely girl, that our relationship was merely functional, the attraction simply physical? I wonder, what's the difference between what I feel for you and what you feel for him?"

Her eyes assessed him and obviously found him lacking. Aya didn't want to listen to her suppositions; in fact, he didn't want to hear anything she had to say at all. His heart was pounding in his chest, and his breath came short and quick. He looked down at the floor to stop himself from yelling at her, screaming his frustration. What did she know about his relationship with Yohji?

"You think he cares about you," she continued quietly.

Aya raised his head defiantly. "He did." _Once._

"And you never cared for me." Sakura nodded thoughtfully. "Hmm. Yes, maybe that _is_ the difference." She shrugged. "But then, I tell myself the same thing. Ask me right now and I would say you love me. You just won't admit it. I think our situations are more similar than different."

Aya shook his head. "No."

"I don't think the two of you are as close as you think, in any case," she continued coldly. "You are such a mess emotionally. I think Yohji just feels sorry for you."

"No."

She scoffed. "Remember when you first joined Weiss? All those times you got into some sort of trouble and he had to pull you out? I think, in the beginning, your subconscious staged all those crisis situations just so that Yohji would have to rescue you. You kept pushing him away, but all you really wanted was his attention."

"No."

"Then, when things got too complicated, when he started showing some interest in you beyond friendship, you turned on him, more than once, subconsciously seeking his death— "

Aya jumped up from the sofa. "No!"

He couldn't breathe. His chest hurt terribly. He stared down at her in shock and in anger. What was she accusing him of? That he . . . _That he_ . . . Sakura stared at him impassively, and the face that looked so much like his girlfriend _but wasn't_ merely waited for him to calm down. "No," he said again. "You're wrong." Wasn't she? _Wasn't she?_

"Then why don't you tell me what's real, Aya, because all I see is you living an illusion and dying for a fantasy."

Aya turned his back on her, paced, stopped, stared accusingly at the unrelenting whiteness of a wall that seemed to stretch on and on into infinity. _Why not?_ he thought bitterly. If he was going to be stuck here in this white house of death, in this hell of his own making, why not at least be . . . honest?

"It wasn't . . . it wasn't the way you just said," he started haltingly with his back still turned. "Yohji and I . . ." _How to explain?_ "He . . . understands me. Everyone else is . . ." Aya paused. Swallowed. "There is no one _else."_

Sakura shrugged. "Obviously, you feel very strongly about him, but how do you know he feels the same way about you?"

"You don't understand!" Aya whirled and pointed at her. He couldn't remember ever feeling so frustrated in his whole life. He pushed his bangs back from his face and tried to calm down, tried to find the right words to explain. "We have . . . a connection. Yohji seemed to know everything about me right from the very beginning. He looks at me and I feel . . ." He paused, blinked, and tried to continue around the lump in his throat. "I never had to say anything. _I never had to say anything at all."_

+

"Hey Aya!" Yohji called out as he came barreling down the basement stairs, dark locks flying, green eyes flashing. He stopped right at the base of the steps with one hand still resting on the banister impatiently. "Are you busy?"

Aya was polishing his sword. Meticulously. He broke his concentration just long enough to look up, glare at Yohji with a silent command that his older teammate just _go away,_ leave him in peace. Wasn't there anyplace in this building other than his own apartment where he could be alone?

"Aya." A pause. "Aya!" Yohji huffed, exasperated. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that ignoring people is rude?"

He was up and across the room, slamming Yohji into the wall before his katana had time to hit the floor. "Don't talk about my mother," he said through clenched teeth.

Yohji stayed completely still in his grasp for a moment, like a captured bird. The taller assassin didn't try to push him away, didn't become violent or indignant the way he would have expected anyone else to—like Ken, for instance. Yohji simply _breathed_ and stared down at him as if they were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table having tea.

"Geez, Aya," Yohji said softly. "Calm down. It was only an expression. I didn't mean anything by it." Green eyes scanned his face, reading, as if his whole life was written there in bright red ink. "Aya?"

He blinked. The anger drained out of him in a rush and was replaced by an unidentified feeling of . . . _what?_ Discomfort crept up on him from the pit of his stomach and was somehow attached to Yohji's close scrutiny. There was sympathy and understanding in Yohji's eyes. But how could there be? None of his teammates knew anything about his parents' death. No one except Kritiker knew the story, and they had promised the matter would remain confidential. Yet he could see the concern in those eyes clearly—concern for him.

Aya was the first to look away.

They were standing too close. Without the anger serving as a buffer, he could feel the warmth radiating from Yohji's body. _Too close._ Aya stepped back and took a deep breath. Yohji grinned—lopsided, insouciant. He ran a hand through his brunette locks, pushing the hair back and away from his face. Aya's eyes followed the motion of those long, graceful fingers, grateful that there was something else to focus on other than the strange flickers of emotion in green eyes that seemed to see right through him.

Aya was startled but didn't object as Yohji draped an arm around his shoulders, pulling him out of himself, pulling him towards the stairs. It was the first time the older Weiss member had ever been so bold as to touch him— _in friendship._

"Come on," Yohji drawled. "Since you're obviously finished with that sword, I need some help with Seven...."

+

 _"I never had to say anything at all."_

Angrily, Aya tried to dismiss the lump in his throat by swallowing, by shaking his head and silently commanding himself to stop acting like such a _girl,_ such a pathetic mooncalf, taking the littlest things and blowing them all out of proportion.

Sakura had only to _say_ it, to verbalize exactly what he was feeling—and, of course, she did.

"But Aya, Yohji is friendly to everyone—Ken, Omi, Birman, Manx, even _me._ It's his nature." She raised a shoulder and let it fall like an indictment. "I don't see how you had cause to think yourself _special."_

"He saved my life. He worries about me every day. He's the only one I have anything in common with. I don't care what you say. I know . . ." He trailed off. What did he know? Could he really say what Yohji felt with any certainty? _Am I still special to him?_ "I know he—"

"Cares for you?" Sakura sighed. "Well, if you know he cares for you, and you care for him, why did you have to make it so hard?"

"I don't know!" Aya grabbed his hair and pulled. If only there was something he could throw, something to punch. If only he had his sword! What did she want from him? _What does she want me to say?_ He pulled at his hair until the pain brought him back to himself, brought the truth into focus. He let his shoulders slump in defeat.

"I was afraid," he whispered. "I was afraid . . ."

"You were afraid he'd lose interest in you. That he'd treat you like everyone else, and you'd be alone again."

"I only wanted something of my own," he added quietly. "He is the only person . . . I wanted him to want me. I wanted him to need me . . . " _the way I need him._

"So you thought if you created the perfect crisis, he might slip into you like a foot into a shoe and be a perfect fit?"

Aya closed his eyes, and when he answered, his voice was very, very low.

"Yes."

+

"I'll cancel my date."

"No, Yohji-kun! You canceled on her last time! She'll be mad at you!"

Yohji shrugged. "Don't worry, kid. She'll get over it. If not, there's always another fish in the sea." He grinned impishly.

"We can handle him," Ken said.

"Yeah, right. And how are you two geniuses going to get him back up the stairs if he—"

"I can hear you. Yohji go. I can take care of myself. I don't need any of you babying me—"

The room spiraled. Aya's knees buckled, and the last thing he felt on the lucid side of consciousness, were the strong arms that caught him and swept him up before he could hit the floor.

Aya opened his eyes to the early morning sunshine, the sweet scent of vanilla and Yohji asleep in the armchair next to his bed, long limbs askew, still in his dress clothes from the previous night. He studied Yohji's face for the longest time before closing his eyes again and letting sleep reclaim him on the crest of a comforting wave of a bone-deep satisfaction.

+

"But why, Aya? If he meant so much to you, why seek his death?"

He shook his head, denying it. "I didn't—"

"Stop lying, Aya! This is not the place for lies!"

Sakura reached out, bridged the distance between them, for the first time laying a pale hand on his arm, and said simply, "This is the white place of beginning, where a person's soul is laid bare."

+

"What the FUCK happened, Aya?"

Aya shrugged. "I wasn't close enough. I didn't see you."

"Which was it? Yohji snarled. "Were you not close enough or didn't you see me?"

Aya merely glared at him impassively. Yohji held his gaze for a timeless, accusatory moment, then turned his back.

"Yeah. Whatever, Aya," he said as he walked away. "You weren't close enough to help. You didn't see me getting my ass kicked. I got it."

+

"Why are you doing this to me?" Aya yelled. His voiced cracked; it echoed oddly in the barren white expanse, rebounding back on him like a boomerang, mocking him with the intensity of his feeling of persecution. "I never wanted to hurt him! All I wanted . . . all I ever wanted . . ." _was to drink the yellow sunbeam of his style, devour his almond skin, rest in the fleeting shade of his eyelashes._

Sakura reached out, pulled him into her arms. He rested his head on the top of her head as his tears soaked her brown hair.

"I'm not trying to hurt you, Aya, but this is for your own good," she whispered soothingly. "You were born under a tragic star; death dogs your path. It is your life's burden to be blind to the most important things, and too easily distracted by the mundane. Death is the mundane, Aya. Don't you see? You have to learn to let yourself love despite death—and not the simple, compassionate love you feel for your sister, and not the safe love you feel for me. Love—consuming, passionate, beyond reason. No matter the burden. No matter the cost." She took him by the shoulders and made him take a step back. She reached up and wiped a thumb across his wet cheek.

"Love is the greatest thing, Aya. Truly, it's the greatest thing...."

Aya stared at her for a moment. He wanted to believe her, but he knew better. He turned his head, letting her hand fall away from his face. "It's too late," he said. _He will never forgive me._ "He won't forgive me."

"I forgive you. Yohji will forgive you, too. You can have your second chance if you have the courage to take it."

"No." he shook his head. "You're wrong. He'll _never_ forgive me." What did she know anyway? After all, she was just a girl. He had learned a hard lesson years ago as he watched his parents die and his sister get mowed down by a car: for all the most important things in life, there are no second chances.

"Listen to me, Aya," she continued with urgency, breaking into his thoughts. "You don't have to stay here. You can go back, fix things. You still have a choice to make, and that choice can change _everything._ I'm here to offer you that second chance."

"A choice?" His heart started to pound again, brutally. "I can go back?" He shook his head. _No._ There was too much hurt, too much pain and _betrayal_ behind him. More than anything, he didn't want to go back.

 _Tonight it rains, rains endlessly. And I  
don’t feel like staying alive, heart._

"I don't want to go back. I can't."

Sakura looked at him. "I understand. It's a hard choice." She raised her right hand, palm up, as if to weigh her words in the balance. "If you stay here, I can tell you that within three months your sister will wake up, and she'll live a happy, healthy life. She'll be taken care of for the rest of her days by Omi and Ken and the money Yohji left her."

"Yohji's money?" Aya was incredulous. "What money? How?"

"It's money his mother gave him, but that's not important. It's only important for you to know that your sister will be alive, and happy, and you'll be here, with no pressure, no pain."

"Yohji?"

She raised her left hand, palm up. "He'll be dead."

 _"But why?"_

Sakura sighed softly. "The two of you have your _dayen._ There must be a joining. You can not move on without him."

 _Maybe_ . . . "Will he be here?" Aya asked in a rush. "With me?"

Sakura shook her head. "Not here. He has his own place."

"I'll never see him again?"

"Not until your souls are reborn. Then it will all begin again."

"Will I remember him after this? Will I know that I am here and he is not?"

Sakura nodded.

"Then this is Hell," he pronounced, letting go of a harsh exhalation of breath. "I have no choice at all." He turned away. "What happens if I go back?"

"If you go back, Yohji will be alive, but as you said, he may never forgive you, you may never have what you want so badly, and your sister may never wake up. Everything would be as uncertain as ever." She paused. "I can only promise you more pain."

He had to go back. He couldn't let Yohji suffer for his own weakness. If there was any way he could live....

"Choose."

Aya stared down at her. It was so unfair! He would gladly die if it meant his sister would live, but not if it meant Yohji's death. _Not if it meant Yohji . . ._

Gall welled up in his throat and settled there like a stone. "I _love_ him," he said bitterly. "I thought I only loved _her._ But I love _him."_

"Then choose: go fix things in your life or live the rest of this thread in the white house of death."

 _Choose._

He closed his eyes and remembered: the first time he had fallen into green eyes the color of grass on a bright spring day; the first day he had walked into the living room at the house and seen Yohji without the dark-colored dye in his hair, all golden, like a sunbeam in the flesh; the way he smelled, warm and clean and new and sweet, like the vanilla extract he liked to add to the French toast on the rare days he made breakfast; the way he smiled, sometimes toothy, sometimes lopsided, always flirty, irreverent; the way he felt, like velvet; how his lips felt, like silk.

If he found the right words, the right combination of consonants and vowels, if he explained, if he tried to be a better person, would Yohji forgive him? If he went back now, could he make everything right again?

 _I'll make it up to him, he decided. Somehow. I'll find a way to make it up to him. I swear I will. I swear it. I swear I will...._


	3. Episode Two: Blossoms in Aching White

Episode Two: _Blossoms in Aching White_

 _I swear...._

Aya woke at last from a white dream that slipped and shifted and poured through his mind like sand through fingers spread wide.

Slowly, he regained a realization of self. He was sweaty and sick, and he hurt everywhere a body could hurt. He tried to raise his head but the world rocked; he clutched at those things around him that were solid—the sheet, the edge of the mattress. He was in bed.

The bed was in a room with pale yellow walls. Meticulously, his perception expanded to take in the pictures on those walls, the two overstuffed chairs by the large windows on his right side, and the slanted ceiling with a skylight that poured sunlight into the room like lemonade into a glass. His gaze came to rest on the white flowers—chrysanthemums, his mind supplied automatically—two big bunches in vases on the stand by the biggest window, and then moved to another arrangement on the small table by the side of his bed that screamed "Ken." He knew immediately it had been a gift from his younger teammate.

 _Where am I?_ he wondered. _What has happened to me...?_

His surroundings had a familiar quality. In fact, the room almost reminded him of a . . .

The dam in his head burst. It all came rushing back. The night, the mission, the rooftop—

 _"Yohji."_

He was in a hospital. _Wait._ He was in a place that _looked_ like a hospital. It was actually too quiet to be one in fact. He was intimately familiar with the hive-like atmosphere of a public facility; after all, he went to visit his sister in the Falke Memorial Hospital every other day. While his room had all the trappings of a convalescent facility, the death-like quiet surrounded him like a particularly dense odor.

Anxiety settled like a boulder in the pit of his stomach.

He pushed back the sheet covering his lower half and pulled up the gown he wasn't surprised to find himself wearing. He ran a careful hand over the stitches holding his insides in, wanting to laugh at himself; apparently, he couldn't do anything right—not even _that._

Had he managed to survive, when Yohji—

Clenching his teeth, he forced himself to sit up. His breath racked his chest in hard gasps, and his skin broke out in a cold sweat. Next, he attempted to move his legs as a prelude to swinging them to the floor and seeing if he could stand. He could wiggle his toes and bend his knees just fine, but when he tried to move his torso, a red-hot pain turned the area in front of his eyes into rainbow spots.

It took him what seemed like forever to get out of the bed. His first step turned into a barrage of pain, and it was only by strength of will he stayed on his feet. Moving torturously, with the gait of a very old man, he made his way over to the windows. Looking out, his anxiety only increased. He was on the top floor of a tall building. There were no other buildings anywhere in his line of site. Clearly, he was no longer in Tokyo.

His eyes swept the room. No phone, no buzzer, no way to call anyone to explain his circumstances. Apparently, the only way to find out what was going on was to go out and locate a warm body. Though he felt the indignity of his dressing gown keenly, he was not going to sit in bed and wait an indeterminate amount of time for someone to appear.

Having decided his course of action, there was nothing—not even the excruciating pain—that could deter him. There was an incredible need to _know_ that was pressing on his chest, making him feel ready to have a heart attack. As he grasped the steel door handle and pulled, and as the door to his room swung open, he released a silent sigh of relief, thankful that the situation wasn't as bleak as he was expecting. At least he wasn't locked in his pretty prison of a room.

Outside, there was a long corridor that stretched to his left and to his right. Widely spaced doors on each side of the hall made him wonder if they led to other rooms and other patients. He didn't have long to consider the question because he heard the discordant sound of electronic commentary—as if someone had just turned on the television and was flipping the channels—at the end of the corridor to his right, and male voices speaking. He was too far away to make out what they were saying, but the obvious presence of people somewhere close by dictated what he had to do next. Holding his stomach and grimacing with an intense pain that narrowed his vision to a pinprick, he pushed himself in the direction of the noise—the first real sound he had heard since waking up in this deathly quiet facility.

He came to the end of the hall and found an open recreation area. He stood on the periphery, leaning against the wall, hidden by shadows, breathing so hard it took him a moment to realize there were two men across the room, and that one of them was speaking.

"I'll be glad to get out of here. This place gives me the creeps."

The man who made that comment was sitting on a blue sofa with his feet propped up on a low table. He had a can of diet Coke in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He was wearing a white lab coat, as was the man standing by him adjusting the television. Aya assumed both men were doctors.

"We can go back to some sort of regular schedule as soon as he wakes up."

"Are you sure he's _going_ to wake up?"

"Reasonably sure. He's not catatonic. In fact, he's surprisingly agitated considering he has yet to regain full consciousness. Once his body has had enough time to recuperate, he has a great chance to regain all his faculties."

"Man, John. If I had your hands, I wouldn't be stuck writing Prozac prescriptions. If I ever have to go under the knife, you know I want you to be the one doing the cutting."

"I'd like to take all the credit but I think I had a little help with this one. When they brought him in here I didn't give him a snowball's chance in hell to make it. I wouldn't have bothered to operate on him at all if they hadn't insisted. The way he came through surgery—really, it was a miracle. Mr. Kudoh is lucky to be alive. Real lucky."

 _Mr. Kudoh is lucky to be alive._

As darkness edged his vision, as he sagged and slowly slipped down the wall and onto the floor, Aya focused on that one sentence, the careless strumming of words that sounded his redemption. That sentence was the only thing that mattered. _The only thing._ Yohji was alive. He was somewhere in this same facility, and he was alive.

 _Alive._

+

He woke up in bed again, in the same sunlit room, to find Birman sitting at his bedside. Her beautiful brown eyes were fixed on his face with concern. She touched his arm gently.

"You had us worried, Abyssinian. What in the world were you thinking? You're in no shape to be wandering the halls."

Aya shook his head and paid for it with a sharp pain that he used to focus his attention. His condition was unimportant. The only thing that mattered was what he had overhead the doctors saying.

"Yohji?"

"He's here too." She paused. "It was a close call. He's still unconscious, but the doctors feel he'll make a full recovery, given time. You will too, provided you stay off your feet." She patted his arm in a motherly fashion before standing up and walking over to the window. She gazed out thoughtfully. After a while, she looked over her shoulder and said, "You've been unconscious for four days since you collapsed in the hallway, Aya. You ruptured your stitches. We were very worried about you."

Aya raised an eyebrow. He didn't need to say that he thought any concern on her part was merely functional—a desire to preserve Kritiker's investment in Weiss as an asset. After all, weren't they always the first to lie, threaten, coerce—the first to force any one of them to betray a teammate at any time without batting an eyelash? No, Birman couldn't make him believe that any member of Kritiker _cared_ about him personally.

Birman frowned. She seemed to read his skepticism. "Although we throw you boys into the fire on a daily basis, believe it or not we never want any of you to get hurt."

Aya shrugged. "We know our worth to you," he said enigmatically.

"Do you?" Her gazed became speculative. "I don't think you do." She walked back over to his bedside. "We know your work is dangerous; injuries are a regrettable part of the very important work that you do, but we want to make sure you take the utmost care." She paused. "Your injuries were a little stranger than usual this time, Aya. How did you let someone practically kill you with your own sword? It is very unlike you to be so careless."

Aya said nothing; he merely stared at her impassively, and he supposed she attributed his reticence to embarrassment or misplaced pride because she just sighed and shook her head. Obviously, she wasn't aware of exactly what had happened on the rooftop during the mission. It was rather surprising that Ken hadn't told her, really. If the details weren't in the report, then Ken and Omi must have lied to protect him. He wondered what story they had told, and how they had gotten Jack to go along with it.

 _A lot of good lying will do,_ he mused silently. He was sure the fact that his injuries were self-inflicted wouldn't escape the notice of the doctors for long, and it wasn't as if Kritiker would believe he fell on his own sword by accident. Sooner or later, he'd have to explain himself. As if there was any way for him to explain—

"It's a very good thing you're finally awake, Abyssinian. I need you to do something."

"What?"

Birman ignored his question. Instead of answering, she walked over to the door, opened it, and stuck her head out into the hallway. Shortly, she returned to the side of his bed as a burly man in a white coat—quite clearly some sort of medical technician or nurse—entered the room with a wheelchair. "We need to take a short trip," she said as the technician helped him sit up and make a smooth but pain-filled transfer from the bed to the chair. "I'll explain on the way."

She took him by wheelchair out of the room and left down the hall. The technician had disappeared much in the same way he had initially appeared, like a puff of smoke on the wind. They stopped at the end of the corridor, at a door that looked exactly like every other door they had passed—but his heart knew different. Instinctively, every one of his senses screamed out the truth: Yohji was in _this_ room, on the other side of _this_ door.

Aya broke out into a cold sweat.

He didn't want to enter the room. He didn't want to see the disappointment—maybe even hate—in Yohji's eyes. He didn't want to have to explain.

But it seemed he had no choice. He was no longer in control of his own destiny. Before he could voice his objection, Birman had his chair by the handles, and pushed him forward and into the room.

His eyes took in the entire scene in one big sweep, and he recoiled reflexively.

Jack was sitting at Yohji's bedside, holding his hand. Yohji was lying in the bed, his eyes closed, looking much like a reversed fairy tale—the prince charming in an enchanted sleep. Sunlight kissed his face, but he was pale—so pale! It was obvious to Aya, with his extensive experience caring for a person teetering on the thin cusp of life, that Yohji had been unconscious for quite some time.

"How long?" he asked Birman. His voice sounded odd to his own ears; he couldn't imagine what he sounded like to her. Like a madman, surely? His voice caught Jack's attention, though, and before Birman could respond, Jack was standing up, glaring at her and pointing.

"What's _he_ doing here?"

"Jack," Birman chided, "don't. He's Yohji's friend. He has every right to be here."

Jack jerked his head. "He has no friends, least of all Yohji. Isn't that right, Aya."

"Jack—"

"No." Jack cut her off. "He shouldn't be here. He has no right to be here. He—"

"Jack, stop it. Right now. This is not good for Yohji. If you want to argue with me, you'll have to do it outside." She turned on her high heels and exited the room quickly. After a tense moment, Jack followed.

Aya was left alone in the room.

With Yohji.

What was he supposed to do sitting in here while they talked? Aya fidgeted. He shuffled his feet and palmed the wheel handles on his chair. He glanced furtively at the door then wheeled himself over to Yohji's bedside.

He stared at a face that looked so innocent in repose—it made his chest start to hurt again. Tentatively, he reached out his fingers and lightly touched the back of Yohji's hand.

"Couldn't wait for me to leave, could you?" Jack. Viciously.

Aya snatched his hand away and glared at his teammate as the younger man strode from the door to the bed. For a moment, Aya thought Jack was going to attack him, so quickly did he cross the room and place himself between the bed and Aya's chair. Aya watched as Jack smoothed the hair away from Yohji's face then leaned over, kissing his cheek and whispering softly in his ear. Aya's chair was too close to the two of them; he felt like a disgusting voyeur. And when Jack straightened up and turned around, and stood looking down at him with eyes dangerously bright and wet with unshed tears, Aya almost felt a strange sort of sympathy for this teammate whom he hated more than anyone in the world not named Takatori.

Almost.

"He'll never be yours, Abyssinian," Jack hissed. "Never. This is not over, though you have managed to take something that was meant for me."

 _"What?"_

Jack pushed past him, rushed past Birman as she held the door open without saying a word to her. Then he was gone. Birman shut the door, crossed to his chair and looked at him calmly, as if the situation with Jack had never even occurred.

Aya wasn't going to let her get away with it.

"What did he mean by that? What did he mean that I took something from him? I didn't—"

"Aya, Jack is distraught. Obviously, he feels very strongly about Yohji. He was just speaking through his fear. Don't take what he said so seriously."

Aya didn't believe her. Jack was often upset, but never to such an extent that he said things with absolutely no basis in reality. Although this might not be the best time to pursue it, he certainly wasn't going to chalk the comment up to some irrational emotional outburst.

"Why did you want me to come here?"

"For Yohji."

Aya glanced in Yohji's direction, but his eyes shied away before they could come to rest on his sleeping face.

"There's nothing I can do for him. He wouldn't want me here. Jack—"

Birman interrupted him by placing a hand on his shoulder. "Wait."

Aya waited. And waited. Then, like the curtain going up on a theater show, Yohji began to shake his head—little distressed nods. Aya was so startled that he jerked his shoulder away from Birman's hand and wheeled himself closer to Yohji's bedside. In horror, he watched as his teammate started to jerk and twitch in the most agitated way, pushing strange, gurgling noises past the tube in his throat. Aya sat, stunned, as he realized what the sound was, the tortured word that Yohji's throat was trying, in his unconscious state, to say.

 _"Aya."_

If he had been standing he would have stumbled back. If he had been standing, perhaps he would have fallen to the ground as his knees buckled out from under him, but he was sitting, and all he could do was kick his feet out, trying to connect with something that could push him away from the bed. But Birman was standing behind his chair; he only succeeded in causing the back of it to bump into her.

 _"Aya."_

Aya twisted his head around, trying to see Birman—anything so he wouldn't have to look at his friend in the bed. Anything so he wouldn't have to hear—

"Why am I here? _What the hell do you want from me?"_ He knew his voice was loud, strident, but he couldn't help himself.

Birman touched his hair gently. Aya jerked his head away.

"Don't touch me."

He ducked his head and stared at his lap. Birman didn't say anything but she didn't touch him again. Instead, she grabbed the handles and pulled his chair away from the bed and settled him nearer the window. She stood in front of him, looking serious, with her arms crossed over the front of her cream-colored suit.

"I need your help, Aya. Yohji needs your help. You see how restless he is. All that mumbling—it's very bad for his throat. The doctors seem to think that your presence will calm him. If he feels you are near, perhaps he won't need to call out for you. Maybe then, he'll get the rest he needs to fully recover."

"He wouldn't want me here," Aya repeated in a low voice. Birman wasn't aware of the true state of their relationship, of all the things he had done. Yohji was saying his name—yes—but not because Yohji desired his presence. Aya recalled that last look of hurt and betrayal in Yohji's eyes as they closed with him lying in a pool of his own blood. If there was one thing Aya knew for sure, Yohji wasn't saying his name because he wanted him near—he was simply locked in that repeating moment when his own teammate had turned his back on him again, on a late night in the rain. If anything, Yohji was saying his name in hate.

"Of course he does. He told me how close the two of you are, that he considers you his best friend."

"He told you that?"

"More than once." She paused.

Aya's chest hurt. He couldn't think around the pain in his head. He knew there was something wrong with this whole situation, that there was much more hidden behind the slick facade of Birman's words. He knew he shouldn't trust her; it was important for him to challenge her and force her to explain the inconsistencies in the things she was saying, but his mind felt sluggish, and he couldn't see a clear path through the thicket.

"What about Jack?" he asked slowly. What did she expect him to do? Sit here and hold Yohji's hand until Jack came back and killed him or Yohji woke up and did it himself?

"Jack's on his way back to the flower shop."

"Ken and Omi?"

"They came by earlier and brought some of your personal belongings."

"When will they be back?"

"They won't be. This facility is not open to visitors. One exception was made to allow them to see you and Yohji when you were first admitted. Ken, Omi and Jack will take care of the flower shop while you and Yohji are here recovering."

"Where's 'here'?"

Birman gazed at him impassively. "The exact location of this facility is classified."

Aya blinked. "Are we prisoners?"

"Of course not! You're just being kept here for your own safety while you recover."

"For our own safety?" Aya said, amazed. "Since when do we need to be locked up for our own safety? What danger are we in exactly, and if we _are_ in danger, how is it okay for the rest of Weiss to be out running the flower shop?"

"This is a special case."

"What is? You're not making any sense!"

"Listen, Abyssinian. Right now, the two of you are vulnerable—especially Yohji. I know how this seems to you but it is not realistic to think that Yohji could recover in a public hospital somewhere when he can't even defend himself. And you—I know you don't realize it but you were unconscious for almost two weeks, and even now, you're as weak as a kitten.

"Weiss has enemies; Kritiker has enemies—any of whom would love to get their hands on you or him. We can't risk either one of you being captured.

"But that's beside the point that Yohji needs the best care possible. He can get that—here."

Aya stared at her. He knew she was lying. If there was any truth to what she was saying, it was watered down and carefully portioned out.

"What is it you want me to do?"

"Your orders are to stay at this facility, recover, and undergo counseling."

 _"Counseling?"_

"Merely a formality. Don't worry about it right now."

This was ridiculous. He would _not_ stay here. "I won't stay here."

Her gaze turned to granite. "You will." She softened her voice. "Are you going to walk out of here like that, Abyssinian? You can barely stand. Don't make this harder than it needs to be."

He tried another tact. "I want to see my sister. I won't leave her alone."

"Your sister is under our protection. She'll be fine while you're recovering."

"If you think you can keep me here—"

"I don't _think_ anything. We _can_ keep you here." She sighed. "If we bring your sister to this facility while you recover, would you be satisfied?"

"Yes."

She was silent for a long moment. "Are you sure this is really what you want?"

"Yes."

"Fine. I'll arrange it, but there's one stipulation: I'll let you know when she gets here and allow you to make sure she's alright, but after that, you won't be allowed to see her."

 _"What?"_

"This section of the facility is only open to people with a level six security clearance. Your sister would have to be housed in a non-secure area. You wouldn't have the free run of the place to visit her. I'm only allowing her here at all so you'll feel confident she's safe. I don't want you to spend all your time at your sister's bedside."

"But why? This makes no sense." What was there to be gained by keeping him away from his sister?

"Kritiker has made a significant investment in you and Yohji over the years. We expect you to concentrate fully on your rehabilitation. Consider it your next mission."

"You're isolating us," he accused.

"Not true. This is just a temporary arrangement to allow you to recover in a safe environment. Just relax. Think of it as a vacation." Aya glared at her. She returned his gaze without flinching. "I have to go."

Aya shifted in anticipation of being wheeled back to his own room. He was tired. He would think about the ramifications of the present situation later.

"Stay here. Your bed is in the process of being moved to this room. I need you to watch Yohji."

 _"What?"_

"I've already sent Jack home. Someone needs to take his place. I don't want Yohji to be alone."

What did he have to say to her to get her to understand? "He wouldn't want me here." Aya pronounced each word distinctly.

Birman didn't respond. Instead, she walked towards the door.

"How long?" he asked quietly before she could escape the room. How long would they be stuck in this place like prisoners?

She paused with her hand on the door handle. "However long it takes," she answered finally.

 _However long it takes._


	4. Interlude: A Heart So White

_Interlude: A Heart So White_

 _Yohji dreamed he died, and felt the cold darkness close over him. Raindrops fell, by ones, by twos. There was only this timeless moment—of eyes like violets, a flash of crimson hair. Perception narrowed, until all that was left of life was contained in Aya's presence; and it was only the sight of his pale and perfect face that filled up the vacancy._

 _Aya._

 _Aya._

+

There was something odd about her posture, the way she was standing there aggressively with her hand outstretched, framed by the line of parked cars behind her and the light of the moon overhead. Clearly, she was attempting nonchalance but couldn't quite pull it off. Maybe it was the strangely resonant tone of her voice that raised goose bumps on his arms and sent a chill down his spine, the same sort of reaction that always washed over him right before he killed someone, and occasionally, right before a momentous event or an impending disaster. His instincts told him to expect the worst, that something important was right around the bend, just over the star-speckled horizon. Yohji prided himself on his instincts. They never failed him. They didn't fail him now.

"Here."

Yohji took the photographs from her hand, glancing at the topmost with interest. He blinked, surprised to see the image of a boy with a pale, heart-shaped face and intense violet eyes staring back at him two dimensionally. Yohji absorbed the non-Japanese features with his mouth agape, a half-smoked cigarette dangling loosely from the corner of his lips, in imminent danger of falling out of his mouth entirely. _This is the kid?_ he thought incredulously. _Oh come on!_ Yohji looked over at Birman. "He has red hair," he remarked, stating the obvious, but, for the life of him, it was the first objection that came to mind. _And his eyes are . . . purple?_

"What?"

Yohji waved a gloved hand in the air, glaring at her accusingly. "The kid. He has red hair."

"So what?"

"Well . . ." Yohji paused, his eyes falling again to the picture in his hand, "it's pretty unusual." _Fucking conspicuous would be more like it,_ he thought, _but if she wants to ignore the obvious...._

"Yes, it is, Balinese. What's your point?"

"Nothing." Yohji shrugged, glancing around as a car alarm sounded in the distance, on a lower level of the parking garage where he and Birman were having another one of their periodic meetings. He dropped his spent cigarette and crushed it under the heel of his boot, freeing both hands to flip through the rest of the pictures. There were ten of them in all, of the kid in various places—the park, a school of some sort, a restaurant—but Yohji returned compulsively to the first one, the close-up of the kid's face. "I hope he doesn't have a temper to go along with that hair," he mumbled. Then he raised his voice so Birman could hear him clearly. "Okay, shoot," he said. "What's his story?"

"His name is Ran Fujimiya. He's eighteen—"

 _"Eighteen?"_ Yohji scoffed. This kid with the perfect porcelain face and the unencumbered, almond-shaped eyes of a sheltered teen was only two years younger than himself? Yohji shook his head. "Someone lied to you. He looks sixteen— _at the most."_

Birman scowled. "Do you want to hear this?" she asked, annoyed. Yohji closed his mouth and plastered an appropriately contrite expression on his face. After a pause to assess his sincerity she continued, "Until about a year ago, he lived with his family in the Denenchofu district. He is a reserved and gifted young man with a first class education. He is also a very accomplished swordsman. We fully expect him to be a useful addition to Weiss."

Yohji whistled, impressed. "Denenchofu? Not bad. Poor little rich boy?"

The corner of Birman's mouth twitched. "Not . . . exactly."

Yohji studied the boy's face carefully. _Ran Fujimiya._ He still couldn't believe the kid was eighteen, no matter what Birman claimed.

Absently taping the side pocket of his black coat, Yohji retrieved a new cigarette from his pack and lit it, one-handed, with practiced ease. He took a drag, flipping to the photo of the Fujimiya kid and a young girl with raven braids and a gigantic smile of innocent brilliance. They were in the park, and the kid was pushing the girl on a swing. "Who's this?" he asked as he exhaled smoke in Birman's direction.

"His sister."

"He has a sister?" Yohji was surprised. Usually, Kritiker targeted strays or kids without close ties, especially for a group like Weiss.

"Yes, but just the sister. His parents are dead."

"Dead?"

"Murdered."

Yohji nodded his head. That explained Kritiker's interest in the kid, but it didn't explain why they wanted him in Weiss. "Where's the girl?" he asked. "Is he responsible for her? I really don't think—"

"The girl won't be a problem," Birman said, interrupting him smoothly. "She's in a coma."

Yohji raised an eyebrow, studying her face for a moment. "How . . . convenient."

Birman rolled her eyes, tapping her foot in irritation. "We had nothing to do with it."

Yohji made a small, noncommittal sound and continued to shuffle the photos like cards. When he was satisfied he had all the pertinent details committed to memory, he looked up, giving Birman a long, full body assessment that took in her high-heeled shoes, giraffe legs, gray Chanel suit and upswept hair-do in one smooth visual caress that left the girl with a light pink blush on her cheeks.

"Why?" Yohji interjected into her discomfort.

"Why what?" she asked, exasperated but professional, making an admirable attempt to school her features into cool indifference—and succeeding.

"Why now? Why him?" Yohji elaborated. "The team has been functioning just fine. We don't really need another member." He studied the close-up again, tilting it into the moonlight, intrigued by how truly remarkable the kid's eyes were. He certainly had never seen anyone with eyes quite that color— _like wet violets._

"Is he a new recruit or a current asset on one of the other teams?" Yohji asked.

"You know I'm not allowed to talk about our other operations with you," Birman admonished, glancing with longing at the silver Benz parked in the space next to Seven, as if she couldn't wait to get in her car and leave. Either she was tired of meeting in the middle of the night on the top level of parking garages all over Tokyo or his questions about the Fujimiya kid were making her nervous. Watching her, Yohji thought he knew which was the more likely reason for her sudden skittishness.

So he flashed her one of his most charming half-smiles, designed to reassure her and to stop her from leaving before he could gain a better handle on what was going on. He was prepared to pull out all the stops to get a little more information out of the notoriously reticent Kritiker secretary even though Birman was not his type _at all._ Oh, she was attractive, but Yohji had never really found her appealing sexually, and she had never expressed any particular interest in him. Although he was able to get under her skin occasionally if he tried hard enough, there was just something of the praying mantis about her—as if she'd just as soon eat a man alive as bed him. It gave Yohji the creeps. As a result, he always preferred to keep their relationship mostly professional, but the prospect of acquiring a new teammate called for extraordinary efforts. "Well, darling," he drawled, draping an arm around her shoulders and lowering his lips to her ear, "you're going to have to tell me _something_ about the kid. You know I don't do my best work with blinders on."

Birman sighed, shrugging him off. "Don't try to charm me, Balinese. I'm immune to you."

Yohji's crescent smile expanded into a toothy grin. "That's what they all say before the panties hit the floor."

Birman scoffed; her dainty, manicured hand reached out and smacked the back of his head.

"What the—" Yohji backpedaled to get away from her. "Watch the hair, woman!"

Birman smoothed down the front of her obscenely short skirt and continued in her business-like fashion as if nothing had happened, completely ignoring Yohji's indignation. "The Fujimiya boy is currently assigned to one of Kritiker's non-lethal groups," she explained, "but he's gotten himself in some trouble recently and is in imminent danger of his services being terminated. Truthfully, Balinese, unless you're able to manage him, the boy's future is at risk. There are certain people calling for his . . . _permanent_ . . . retirement. It's only the fact that Persia backs his integration into Weiss that will save his life."

"Which group is he with?"

"That's classified."

Yohji looked at her askance. "Why don't you just tell me exactly what's wrong with him?"

"Enough with the questions, Balinese!" Birman ordered, exasperated. "You're putting me in a bad position. He'll be joining Weiss shortly—so you should prepare yourself. That's all you need to know."

"I already have one hothead to manage," he complained. "His name is Ken Hidaka. I don't need another loose canon."

She was silent for a moment, studying him. "You wish to sign his death warrant then?"

"Of course not," Yohji huffed, running a finger lightly across the surface of the close-up, along the artificial representation of the boy's cheek. "The kid's as pretty as a girl," he mused absently, forgetting for a moment that it was _Birman_ who was standing right next to him.

Yohji glanced up to find Birman smirking—of course.

"He doesn't have the face of a killer," Yohji explained defensively, glaring at her. "You can't just dump a problem rich kid on me and expect me to make him into the perfect little assassin at the snap of my fingers, no matter how good he is with a sword." Yohji shook his head. "A non-lethal group? I guess that means he's never killed anybody?"

Birman put her nose in the air, not deigning to answer. Yohji sighed. "No, of course not." He flicked the ashes off the end of his cigarette. "I want a raise," he grumbled. "Does the kid know about us?"

"Not yet."

Yohji gritted his teeth but remained silent as Birman moved past him and put a black-heeled shoe up on Seven's bumper, using the leverage to adjust the stocking and garter on her left leg. "I've arranged for the initial contact to take place next Saturday night," she added, glancing over her shoulder. "That gives you a few days to get used to the idea." She finished with the left leg and did the same for the stocking on the right. Yohji watched her pull out the little silver .22 caliber gun she always carried strapped to her outer thigh and check the chamber. If he could have stomached the girl at all, he'd have been in a puddle at her beautiful feet, but his only reaction to the whole—admittedly sexy—display was a cold chill that ran the length of his spine. He shuddered and decided he needed another cigarette.

Birman finished her grooming, straightened, and leveled her gaze on him coolly. "I'll arrive at the flower shop with a mission for the team on Friday in the usual way," she continued. "It'll be a simple operation—information retrieval from an office building downtown. I know what to use to draw the Fujimiya boy to the site. While Siberian and Bombay take care of business, you'll help me inform Ran of his options."

Yohji took a deep drag of his just-lit cigarette. "Why all the theater?"

She shrugged a shoulder. "These things have to be done properly."

"Do you want me to clue Ken and Omi?"

"Unnecessary. There's no need to upset them prematurely. Ran might say no."

"And if he does?"

"At that point he will have seen the face of Weiss," she said evenly, without a trace of emotion. "The only choice for him is to accept my proposal or die. If he refuses, his life is forfeit and either you or I will have to handle it."

A startled eyebrow went up. "You'd want me to kill him?"

Her face was stiff as she answered. "Would you have a problem with that, Balinese?"

He flicked his cigarette away and shrugged a shoulder. "Who me? Of course not," he said lightly. "I'm just the hired help."

+

Yohji hurried down a neon-lit, trash-strewn alley in Shomben Yokocho, mumbling to himself with such vehemence that even the corner prostitutes were staring at him oddly. Yohji Kudoh was _nobody's_ automaton, he groused to himself, regardless of what he had said to Birman yesterday. He was not about to kill _any_ kid just because the kid refused to accept the dubious honor of murdering people for a living.

He stopped at the back of the narrow walkway, at a stairwell that led down into the underbelly of the city. After glancing towards the street to make sure no one had followed him, he descended the stairs.

What it all came down to was this: he needed to know why Kritiker had targeted Fujimiya for Weiss just in case Birman gave the order to garrote the little redhead. For some reason, the thought of killing the kid made his stomach lurch. Yohji didn't _kill_ children, hence, he wanted to make sure all of his options remained open. To do that, he had to know the facts. Fortunately, the always-reticent Birman wasn't his only source of information. He had his own ways of finding out the details—the kid's background, the team he was currently with, what he had done to get on Kritiker's bad side, and most importantly, why Kritiker wanted to turn the kid into an assassin. Besides, Yohji had a strict policy of verifying every piece of canned information he received from his employers that could end in him having to take a life. In the assassination business, a man quickly learned to trust no one—least of all the nameless, faceless people cutting the check.

Yohji knocked on the door at the bottom of the steps. He waited, pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose to hide green eyes that were way too memorable for his line of work and tapping a foot, until the sumo wrestler who doubled as the bouncer opened the door. Yohji recognized him, grunted a greeting and gave the password. Maneuvering around the man's extreme bulk, he entered the smoky, dimly lit interior of one of the seedier strip clubs in Tokyo. Immediately, one of the male hosts sauntered up to him, asking above the grinding rhythm of the music if he wanted a Japanese, American or Canadian girl. Yohji pulled out his wallet, giving the man enough money to cover anything he could possibly have a mind to do that night twice over, and indicated he just wanted to take a table in a corner and watch for the time being. The host's shit-eating grin expanded from ear to ear as the man pocketed the money and led him across the room. The man's cloying demeanor brought to mind one of the many reasons Yohji hated places like this.

The bevy of other reasons were the naked, twelve year-old girls dancing on the tables.

Yohji took a seat, sighing softly as he looked around. _Where is she?_ he wondered. He tried to get a decent look at the gaggle of older, half-clad dancers sitting in the corner to his right without seeming obvious, thinking he might recognize one of them, but he was just kidding himself. He probably wouldn't recognize Lily if she walked up to him and slapped his face. She was _that_ good. He resigned himself to waiting, slumping back in his chair and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lit one. After he took a deep, relaxing drag, he waved over one of the topless waitresses and ordered a drink.

It was disgusting, seeing grown men lusting after girls a fraction of their age. On another night, on another mission, Yohji would have been happy to teach each of them a lesson in the finer points of having respect for the spark of innocence in life. He nibbled on his lip. But not tonight—tonight he had a different agenda. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the picture he had palmed during his meeting with Birman—the one of the kid, _Ran Fujimiya._

"What the—" Yohji sputtered as alcohol rained down upon him, wetting the front of his shirt and some of his right arm. He jerked his head up, glaring at the apologetic waitress who had just managed to spill a drink all over him.

"I'm—I'm so sorry, sir," she stammered, trying to wipe at his shirt. "I'm so sorry." With the girl feeling up the front of him, ostensibly trying to fix the situation and with her breasts in his face, Yohji was predictably flustered. He put the kid's picture back in his pocket and got to his feet hurriedly in an effort to calm her.

"It's alright," he said, smiling, trying to keep the waitress at arm's length.

"No, it's not. I'm so sorry. I'm such a klutz. My manager—he's going to kill me. Please sir, let me help you."

"Don't—" Yohji tried to capture her hands to stop her from pulling at his shirt. He didn't want to embarrass himself; the girl was practically nude and even though Yohji was on a mission, he was still a guy. The onslaught of sensations was almost too much for any red-blooded man to ignore.

"It was just an accident. It's okay," he assured her, backing away.

"No, it's not. You're soaking wet. Please, come with me. In the back, I can take care of you." The waitress stepped in close and a hand brushed the front of his pants, sending an electric shock straight to his groin. Yohji jerked back in surprise. _What the—?_ He looked around wildly, catching the eye of the host who had seated him as the girl started pulling him across the room. The man had that big shit-eating grin on his face, and Yohji realized he had just been suckered into a situation designed to make the average male spend a whole lot of money. Before he knew it, he was being ushered into one of the small private rooms in the back—the ones where no reasonable sexual request was off-limits, provided your pockets were deep enough. The girl was plastered to the front of him, kissing his neck, and as the door started to swing closed, he wondered how he was going to extricate himself from this situation without causing a scene.

Yohji tried to push the girl away again, but she was stuck to him like glue. "Listen, I don't—"

He sucked in a breath at another feather light touch to the hardness in the front of his pants. Yohji slapped at her hand. He was getting annoyed as the door shut behind him with finality. He was in the club on business and needed to get back out to the main room. What if he missed Lily messing around with this girl? "Look, I can't do this right now. I—"

"Yohji."

Yohji jerked away, stumbled, fell back onto the twin bed positioned against the wall. "Lily," he breathed. It was obvious, now that he could take a good look at her.

"My Yohji." She smiled at him as she nonchalantly gathered her long black hair and twisted it on top of her head. Yohji supposed it had been her loose hair that had made her look so different—made him not recognize her at all. She hardly ever wore her hair down. He wanted to kick himself. He should be able to recognize his own mother—even if she was practically naked, even if he only saw her once in a blue moon. She did this to him every time.

Yohji sat up on the bed, pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and grinned. It only hurt a little when his mother flinched as she saw his eyes—eyes that reminded her too much of his father—but the pain had dulled over the years, and he couldn't fault her for it at all. He cocked an eyebrow. "And I was just saying to Hidaka that women over thirty were way too old and saggy for my taste."

She slapped at him. Yohji ducked, laughing. "I'm only thirty-four, Yohji. I'm not over the hill yet, even if I do have a son that's as tall as a weed."

"You know I'm only joking. You're as beautiful as ever, Lily." Yohji got up and kissed her on the cheek. "You don't look a day over twenty-two," he assured her, and it was true.

"Let me have your jacket."

"Right. Of course." Yohji shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Even though it was wet down the right arm from the drink she had spilled on him, it served as sufficient enough covering. In fact, the jacket hung on her much smaller frame like a dress, almost brushing her knees.

"It's not that I mind the nudity," she said with a wave of her hand and a smirk. "I just don't want you to be distracted while we talk. I don't have much time."

Yohji rolled up his sleeves and retrieved a handful of paper towels from the stash next to the condoms on the little table by the bed. He sat down on the mattress, dabbing at the front of his shirt where the drink had done the most damage. The shirt was a silk Armani and most likely ruined. "How long?" he asked, giving up on the shirt and tossing the ball of paper towels across the room at the wastebasket.

"Thirty minutes, tops. Any longer and the manager will come looking for me."

"No surveillance?"

"Of course not. That's why I picked this place." She sat down on the bed next to him. "A lot of things have been happening lately, Yohji, more than I have time to explain right now, but it'll get harder and harder for us to meet without Kritiker suspecting. So get used to these elaborate covers any time you need to see me face-to-face."

Yohji nodded, hiding his disappointment. Even after all these years, he still wished he could have something of a normal relationship with his mother, that everything in his life wasn't so complicated.

"I have the file on the Fujimiya boy. It's in that drawer. Get it, would you?"

Yohji retrieved a manila file folder from the table drawer, marveling that his mother would have everything planned out, right down to the room they would use for this meeting. It was no wonder even the mention of her name made certain people in the Kritiker organization blanch. "This is pretty thick," he remarked, a bit startled to see the size of the file on the kid. He opened the folder, spread the contents out on the bed, and started picking through the things that caught his eye.

"You didn't give me much time," Lily said as he flipped through data sheets, slowing his examination as he came across a collection of pictures, "so I only have what was in the Kritiker archives and some intel from Takatori, but it should be enough. You're on your own with the rest."

Lily began to recite key facts. Yohji was not surprised that she had already studied the file and knew it well enough to speak from memory. "Ran Fujimiya," she said, as if ticking off items on a list, "born July 4, 1977, to Kisho and Ayame Fujimiya. Eighteen years of age. Blood type A. Currently assigned to Crashers."

Yohji's eyebrows collided with his hairline at that piece of information. _Crashers_ was the generic name of the Kritiker party crashing units. Manx recruited teenagers to work the Tokyo party scene, grouping them into teams of four or five. The teams were structured a lot like Weiss but their job was to set people up, not kill them, to frame elusive criminals with evidence the police could use to send them to jail, such as planting drugs in someone's house or placing incriminating information on a computer. Sometimes, Crasher teams were assigned to search and rescue missions. The group would infiltrate and locate, then a team like Weiss would rescue and kill. Yohji had run across Crashers in the past; Weiss had even worked with a unit called _Cougar_ to bust up a child prostitution ring just last year. Once in a while, when he was hanging out in a club or at a house party, he'd run across a team working the scene. The thing he found so remarkable was the fact that the teenagers Manx recruited for the operation were usually the edgy types, street kids comfortable in the wild confines of the sex-crazed, drug-laden, alcohol-soaked underbelly of Tokyo's nightlife. There was no way Yohji could imagine the Fujimiya kid—a kid who grew up in Denenchofu and had a face like an angel—as a Crasher. No way.

Yohji picked up one of the several pictures attached to the dossier. It showed the kid at the beach. He looked to be about seven years old at the time the picture was taken, but he was easily recognizable even at that young age because of his shock of bright red hair. There was an older boy, obviously related to the kid because they looked exactly alike, though the older boy had jet-black hair. The little girl with the big smile was there too, clearly the same girl who had been on the swing in Birman's picture, though she looked to be only about three when the photo had been taken. The kid's mother and father were in the background. Yohji frowned. The whole family looked sickeningly happy. Yohji couldn't imagine the kid being involved with anything as seedy as Crashers; certainly couldn't imagine such a kid as a killer-for-hire.

He picked up the thread of Lily's recital, determined to save his speculation for later. "Kisho Fujimiya," Lily was explaining, "was a very prominent businessman. Self-made, he was the sole shareholder of Fujimiya Securities, Japan's largest global securities house, until about five years ago when he sold a majority interest to Takatori Enterprises. After the sale, Fujimiya became one of Reiji Takatori's right hand men." Lily paused, getting up from the bed and walking across the room as if the walls had begun to close in on her. Yohji knew her agitation was only a reflection of her hate for Takatori. He gathered the scattered pictures and the papers, neatened the pile and placed it on the nightstand. He would go through everything later. He needed to listen more closely to Lily since her body language was often just as important as what she had to say, not stare at a bunch of pictures like a fascinated kitten. They were running out of time.

"In the early nineties," Lily continued with her back turned and from the other side of the little room, "Fujimiya was the top underwriter in the Eurobond market. The company was worth an ungodly amount of money. Reiji must have been funneling money from Fujimiya to fund the genetic enhancement research that has always been his pet project." She turned, staring at him speculatively. "You know—the same research that yielded the serum Kritiker uses on you."

Yohji got up and walked across the room. He didn't want to get into this now. Lightly, he reached out and cupped her cheek. She studied his face for a moment, smiling ruefully. "I know," she said. "This is an argument for another day."

"Exactly."

"Just remember, my darling," she said quietly. "Persia is Reiji Takatori's brother. The whole Takatori vein is poisoned. Nothing good can come of anything that stems from that family, though Persia hides his face to conceal the truth from you."

"I know," Yohji repeated. He decided to change the subject. This was not the time or the place to argue about his involvement in Weiss, or the fact that he still took the drug Kritiker supplied to enhance his performance. "Why does the kid have red hair?"

Lily's smile widened, and it warmed Yohji's heart to see she could now look him right in the eye without flinching. Whenever they met face-to-face, it always took her a while to internalize that his eyes were the eyes of the son and not the father who had brutalized her so long ago.

"Is that the most important thing to ask me?" she chided. "His mother was half British. You'll see in the pictures that her hair was a dark auburn. Ran's coloring is obviously a complete throwback to his mother's side of the family."

Yohji nodded. It made sense and was even particularly interesting because Yohji's blood was mixed too—his father was an American. At least he would have something in common with the kid. "What happened to his family?" he asked, moving to sit back down on the bed.

Lily pulled a chair over and straddled it. "Reiji Takatori murdered them. Ultimately, I suppose it was to get complete control of the company. Last May, Reiji had his people frame Kisho and set off a bomb in Fujimiya headquarters on the day family members visit for the company party, killing both parents."

Yohji grimaced.

"Schwarz was involved."

His grimace turned into a full-fledged scowl.

"Ran and his sister, Aya, were standing outside the building when the bomb went off. The girl was knocked unconscious. She's in a coma in Falke Memorial."

Yohji shook his head, sighing softly.

"All the details are in the file. Bottom line: the boy was left with absolutely nothing. He sold his soul to Kritiker to pay the girl's hospital bills—"

"—And, since Persia runs Kritiker, to another Takatori," Yohji finished for her. He couldn't explain why his stomach tightened the way it did as Lily told the story, or why there should be such a bitter taste in his mouth, weighing down his tongue. He just knew it was a damn shame that men like Reiji Takatori were free to ruin so many lives. The Fujimiya kid had been living what looked to be the perfect life. Now his whole family was dead, or as good as dead, and a member of the very family that had caused him such misery wanted to turn him into a murderer. Yohji ran a hand through his hair. Perhaps it was pity that pooled in the pit of his stomach and soured his mouth. He resolved to do everything he could to make Ran's transition into Weiss go smoothly. He certainly wasn't going to let Kritiker kill the kid. The life of an assassin was a hard one, but at least it was a life.

"Undoubtedly, that's the reason Persia backs his integration into Weiss," Lily speculated. "Knowing Persia, he feels guilty and wants to give the boy a chance for his revenge."

Yohji raised an eyebrow. "I thought the kid was on Kritiker's short list of expendable assets."

"He is. Ran has been pursuing a solo vendetta against Reiji Takatori a bit too vigorously. His latest escapade got him picked up by the police. Kritiker had quite a problem getting him out of the mess and wiping his record. I have no doubt they will kill him if the move to Weiss doesn't work out. The goal of Persia's life is to bring down his brother. Ran will not be allowed to continue stumbling along like a bull in a china shop."

"God forbid the kid should fuck anything up," Yohji remarked sarcastically. "Where did those pictures come from?" he asked, inclining his head towards the photographs on the table. "He's a child in most of them."

"Exactly!" She beamed at him like a proud parent—which she was, Yohji supposed. Proud that he had survived, and had taken after her, and had obviously learned his craft so well. "That's the same question I asked after I found them in the _Kritiker_ archive. At first I thought the pictures were simply collected from the Fujimiya house sometime after the murder, but as I looked at them, I realized they were developed on non-acidic, standard Kritiker issue, the type of stock that wouldn't be available commercially." Yohji nodded slowly. "I would bet money Kritiker had those pictures taken; obviously, they've been watching the Fujimiya family for a very long time."

"The question is why," Yohji added. "Why would they have that family under surveillance for so many years, and what does Kritiker want with the kid now?"

She shrugged. "Find out why Reiji Takatori murdered the parents—in a way that made it front page news for a month—when he already had control of the company, and you'll have your answers."

"How much do you charge these days?" Yohji's voice was dry. "This situation is getting more and more complicated. I might need to hire you to help me connect the dots."

Lily scoffed. "You're as good as I am at ferreting out information. I've taught you everything I know, and there never was a better detective. You don't need your old mother. I think you can handle this." She got to her feet and reached out a hand. Yohji grasped it and let her pull him to his feet.

"I'll always need you, Lily," he said. "Always."

She sighed. "I hope to always be here for you whenever you need me. Just remember, my darling, this is very serious business," she said, straightening his collar. "Remain focused. Try to stay one step ahead of the game." She took the sunglasses from the top of his head, settled them on the bridge of his nose, and tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. "Kritiker wouldn't hesitate to mortgage your life. Never trust anything they tell you; always have an out ready—"

Yohji held up a hand, stopping her. "Stay free of emotional attachments; they can be used against me," he added, finishing her credo for her because he knew it by heart. "I know, Lily. I know."

"And Yohji," she said, stepping back. "Schuldig has taken an interest in the Fujimiya boy." Yohji froze at the mention of the German telepath. "It's all in the file. Be very careful."

"I will," he promised, running a hand through his hair. _Schuldig!_ How had the kid managed to acquire such powerful enemies at such a young age?

"It's late," Lily interjected into his musings. "We have to get out of here. You'll have to . . ." She motioned with her hand, and Yohji's eyebrows shot up.

"You're joking."

"No, actually, I'm not. It would raise suspicions if there was no evidence that we . . ." She waved her hand again. "I'll turn around."

Yohji was speechless. How in the world was he supposed to jerk off with his mother in the room? Sometimes, his life was so damn surreal. He sighed. He sure could use a cigarette right about now.

"Hurry up, Yohji."

"Alright," he grumbled, walking over to the little bed stand and grabbing a condom. This was so embarrassing! He unzipped his pants, settled on the bed, grabbed his limp cock and squeezed. After a minute of pulling and pumping he had to admit it wasn't working. He leaned back against the wall, looking around the small room, trying to find some inspiration. He closed his eyes, opened them again. He turned his head to the side, looked down at the bed. His eyes flitted over to the little table with the file, came to rest on the picture of Ran Fujimiya, the kid with the heart-shaped face and the strange, purple eyes. The kid really was as pretty as a girl.... Yohji felt himself harden. He tore open the condom and deftly slipped it on. He pumped into his fist, staring at the picture, until he reached his climax with a shudder. Disgusted, he pealed off the used condom, tied the end and tossed it in the wastebasket. He wiped his hand on the sheets and zipped himself back up.

"I hope that's convincing enough," he said dryly as Lily turned around. He gathered up the file and the pictures, sticking them down the back of his pants. Lily passed him his jacket.

"I would think so," she said with a lopsided grin. "You go out first. I'll follow in a minute." He turned to go. "And Yohji," she said softly to his back, "be careful. I love you, my darling."

"I love you, too," he answered without turning around. It was hard, not knowing when he'd see her again. He opened the door and exited the room, walking into the main area of the bar confidently, unconcerned, as if he hadn't just spent thirty minutes sharing secrets with a world-class spy for his job as a world-class assassin. He sighed softly as he made his way back over to his table to show face for another thirty minutes before he could legitimately leave this hole in the wall and its depraved clientele without raising suspicions. What a life he lived.

+

He located the Fujimiya kid easily through the smoke and shadows even though the house was crowded with undulating bodies partying like the world was coming to an end. The kid stood out like a sore thumb, with his red hair, the pale luminescence of his skin and an outfit of black patent leather and zippers in a style that that looked much too forced and made Yohji's fashion sense wince. There was a tall blonde dressed floridly in white that Yohji immediately recognized as one of the kid's teammates—Yuushi, his memory supplied, a.k.a. _Knight_ — who had the kid effectively penned in a corner. They were arguing fiercely. Yohji frowned at the obvious possessiveness, the way the tall blonde had a hold of the kid's arm, the way he wouldn't let the kid move past him. Obviously, the two were either adversaries or close friends, or maybe even . . . lovers? Yohji brought his beer to his lips, took a swig, and watched the scene unfold speculatively until Knight stormed away, leaving the kid standing alone in the corner with a scowl on his face that could kill. Yohji bit his lip worriedly as he considered the implications of the kid having such a strong attachment to someone who was soon to be a former teammate.

As if the fact that someone was watching him rang some internal bell, the kid turned in his direction. Yohji froze. Their eyes met across the crowded room, locked momentarily, casually, and flitted away.

Yohji turned abruptly, moving towards the front door quickly with one hand fisted at his side and the other clenching the neck of his beer bottle. His chest was heaving as he tried to pull in breath. He felt like a ton of bricks had been dropped on his head.

 _So it was true._ Yohji hadn't believed it when he had read the file: how the Fujimiya kid was out of control, killing anyone he could get to who had anything to do with Reiji Takatori, no matter how tenuous the association. But Yohji recognized the cracked despair in those strange violet eyes immediately—the type of despair and self-loathing that roots in the eyes of people who purposefully kill other people, regardless of the reason. Yohji refused to examine too closely exactly what it was about the look in the kid's eyes that made his hands clench, made his throat tighten in anger and disappointment except the obvious proof that the kid was already broken, lost. There was nothing left of the innocent, happy boy from the photographs—and the proof of it disgusted him. After all the effort Yohji had put into obtaining that file, he hadn't even needed it to tell him that the kid was already a murderer.

 _Damn Reiji Takatori! Damn Persia!_ Yohji swore silently. Did the two of them have to ruin _everything?_

Yohji ran a hand through his hair, telling himself to calm down. It was ridiculous to have thought the kid would be the same as before the explosion; it was stupid to have expected it. There were no white hearts in the assassination game, only hearts stained black with dried blood. Yes, it was actually much better that he wasn't as innocent as Yohji had first assumed. It would make the kid's integration into Weiss more reasonable and Yohji's job that much easier. He put aside his strange disappointment with a decisive nod of his head, exited the house and made his way down the deserted street to where he had parked Seven.

Of course it was better this way.

+

 _Yohji dreamed he died in Tokyo, on a dark stormy night. Rain, a roof of corpses, feet made heavy by clay. Death was the heart that killed so perfectly, with no weapon but a glance. Treacherous heart. Treacherous. Still, he wanted—always wanted._

 _And what he wanted most, he wept for—_

 _Aya._

 _Aya._


End file.
